Thought

In their near common sense, the terms thought together with thinking refer to sensory organs, unlike perception. But when understood in a widest sense, all mental event may be understood as a pretend of thinking, including perception as well as unconscious mental processes. In a slightly different sense, the term thought talked not to the mental processes themselves but to mental states or systems of ideas brought about by these processes.

Various theories of thinking make-up been proposed. They purpose to capture the characteristic attribute of thought. Platonists hold that thinking consists in discerning and inspecting Platonic forms and their interrelations. It involves the ability to discriminate between the pure Platonic forms themselves and the mere imitations found in the sensory world. According to Aristotelianism, to think approximately something is to instantiate in one's mind the universal essence of the object of thought. These universals are abstracted from sense experience and are not understood as existing in a changeless intelligible world, in contrast to Platonism. Conceptualism is closely related to Aristotelianism: it identifies thinking with mentally evoking image instead of instantiating essences. Inner speech theories claim that thinking is a form of inner speech in which words are silently expressed in the thinker's mind. According to some accounts, this happens in alanguage, like English or French. The language of thought hypothesis, on the other hand, holds that this happens in the medium of a unique mental Linguistic communication called Mentalese. Central to this theory is that linguistic representational systems are built up from atomic and compound representations and that this formation is also found in thought. Associationists understand thinking as the succession of ideas or images. They are particularly interested in the laws of joining that govern how the train of thought unfolds. Behaviorists, by contrast, identify thinking with behavioral dispositions to engage in public intelligent behavior as a reaction to particular external stimuli. Computationalism is the near recent of these theories. It sees thinking in analogy to how computers work in terms of the storage, transmission, and processing of information.

Various family of thinking are discussed in the academic literature. A judgment is a mental operation in which a proposition is evoked and then either affirmed or denied. Reasoning, on the other hand, is the process of drawing conclusions from premises or evidence. Both judging and reasoning depend on the possession of the relevant concepts, which are acquired in the process of concept formation. In the effect of problem solving, thinking aims at reaching a predefined aim by overcomingobstacles. Deliberation is an important form of practical thought that consists in formulating possible courses of action and assessing the reasons for and against them. This may lead to a decision by choosing the most favorable option. Both episodic memory and imagination presents objects and situations internally, in an effort to accurately reproduce what was before experienced or as a free rearrangement, respectively. Unconscious thought is thought that happens without being directly experienced. it is sometimes posited to explain how difficult problems are solved in cases where no conscious thought was employed.

Thought is discussed in various academic disciplines. Phenomenology is interested in the experience of thinking. An important question in this field concerns the experiential bit of character of thinking and to what extent this point of reference can be explained in terms of sensory experience. Metaphysics is, among other things, interested in the explanation between mind and matter. This concerns the question of how thinking can fit into the material world as allocated by the natural sciences. Cognitive psychology aims to understand thought as a form of information processing. Developmental psychology, on the other hand, investigates the coding of thought from birth to maturity and asks which factors this coding depends on. Psychoanalysis emphasizes the role of the unconscious in mental life. Other fields concerned with thought increase linguistics, neuroscience, artificial intelligence, biology, and sociology. Various concepts and theories are closely related to the topic of thought. The term "law of thought" refers to three fundamental laws of logic: the law of contradiction, the law of excluded middle, and the principle of identity. Counterfactual thinking involves mental representations of non-actual situations and events in which the thinker tries to assess what would be the case if matters had been different. Thought experiments often employ counterfactual thinking in order to illustrate theories or to test their plausibility. Critical thinking is a form of thinking that is reasonable, reflective, and focused on determine what to believe or how to act. Positive thinking involves focusing one's attention on the positive aspects of one's situation and is intimately related to optimism.

Definition

The terms "thought" and "thinking" refer to a wide quality of psychological activities. In their most common sense, they are understood as conscious processes that can happen independently of sensory stimulation. This includes various different mental processes, like considering an idea or proposition or judging it to be true. In this sense, memory and imagination are forms of thought but perception is not. In a more restricted sense, only the most paradigmatic cases are considered thought. These involve conscious processes that are conceptual or linguistic and sufficiently abstract, like judging, inferring, problem solving, and deliberating. Sometimes the terms "thought" and "thinking" are understood in a very wide sense as referring to any form of mental process, conscious or unconscious. In this sense, they may be used synonymously with the term "mind". This ownership is encountered, for example, in the Cartesian tradition, where minds are understood as thinking things, and in the cognitive sciences. But this sense may increase the restriction that such(a) processes have to lead to clever behavior to be considered thought. A contrast sometimes found in the academic literature is that between thinking and feeling. In this context, thinking is associated with a sober, dispassionate, and rational approach to its topic while feeling involves a direct emotional engagement.

The terms "thought" and "thinking" can also be used to refer non to the mental processes themselves but to mental states or systems of ideas brought about by these processes. In this sense, they are often synonymous with the term "belief" and its cognates and may refer to the mental states which either belong to an individual or are common among acorporation of people. Discussions of thought in the academic literature often leave it implicit which sense of the term they have in mind.

The word thought comes from Old English þoht, or geþoht, from the stem of þencan "to conceive of in the mind, consider".